Museo Civico Ingauno

Albenga's civic museum opened in 1933 inside the medieval Palazzo Vecchio and gathers the archaeology of Albingaunum: Roman inscriptions and urns, the inscription of Gallinara's first recorded abbot, and a late 15th-century Crucifixion by Giovanni Canavesio on the loggia.

Why it matters

This is the museum that turned Albenga's buried Roman city into a public narrative. Founded in 1933 at the initiative of Nino Lamboglia, the archaeologist who built the Istituto di Studi Liguri into a reference for the region, it occupies Palazzo Vecchio, the medieval seat of the commune, so the setting and the collection tell one continuous story of the same ground. The Ministry of Culture's listing makes that double nature explicit: a civic museum of Roman and Byzantine Albingaunum displayed inside the town's communal monument. The name "Ingauno" itself points to the Ingauni, the Ligurian people who inhabited this stretch of coast before Rome. The museum forms part of Palazzo Vecchio's historic complex, alongside the nearby baptistery.

What to notice

The Sala dei Consoli, on the ground floor of the fourteenth-century communal tower, holds Roman and Byzantine inscriptions, small cinerary urns and stone fragments from Albingaunum. These include the inscription of Marinaces, described as the earliest known abbot of the monastery on Gallinara Island. The loggia, built in 1421, contains a first-century AD mosaic floor, a late-imperial marble puteal, medieval inscriptions and historic units of measurement. Its back wall carries a large Crucifixion fresco attributed to Giovanni Canavesio and dated to the late fifteenth century. The windows frame the cathedral and baptistery, linking the museum with the surrounding monuments.

Context and history

When Lamboglia founded the museum in 1933, Ligurian archaeology was still assembling its basic chronology, and Albenga offered unusually rich material because Albingaunum had remained a modest town after the Roman period, never buried under modern construction. The museum grew with his work, and the institute he directed still has rooms in the city. Municipal investment in Palazzo Vecchio's historic buildings expanded the complex's civic role, bringing several municipal cultural services into the historic site.